In certain circumstances it is desirable to be able to generate a path across a static or video image which passes through salient areas of the image for viewing. This is particularly useful in situations where viewing an entire image is not practical either due to time constraints, or because characteristics of the particular viewing platform being used are not suitable, for example, because the platform is not designed to accommodate a particular image size. In general, such a generated path will enable interesting points of the image to be displayed in preference to other areas of the image via the use of a virtual camera which follows the path across the image and which is zoomed-in with respect to the image such that only portions of the image along the path are displayed.
Such a system is particularly advantageous in mobile devices which have imaging functionality, such as mobile phones with built-in cameras, for example. The size of such devices dictates that device display screens are relatively small and therefore not particularly well suited to displaying captured or received images, especially if the images are high resolution images which contain a lot of detail.
Co-pending United Kingdom Patent application number 0104589.7 discusses the elucidation of salient locations in an image, and how salient structure can be determined from these locations. From this structure, a salient viewing path over the image can be provided.
“Automatic Browsing of Large Pictures on Mobile Devices”, Microsoft Research China, MSR-TR-2003-49 discusses the use of saliency as the basis for determining what is interesting in an image, and uses the theory of information foraging to select areas of an image to explore via the use of a viewing path.
The known methods provide reasonably effective ways of displaying the salient material of an image. However, there are drawbacks. The generated display paths only monotonically explore the salient areas of an image. There is no perceptual linkage in the salient areas along a display path. Also, MSR-TR-2003-49, in particular, requires that interesting regions of an image and their extent are marked. Saliency is only used to score regions of interest.